We reported a few months back that it appears Microsoft is playing dirty with Windows Phone 7 and letting applications that compromise on their design guidelines through the approval process to bulk up numbers, and it appears the company is now doing it even more aggressively. Over the last two weeks, Windows Phone App List reports that Microsoft approved around 2,000 applications for Windows Phone 7. A big number, which looks great, but if you look through the applications that have been recently released to the market, you'll see something like this:

This is only a small sample of the applications, too. At time of writing, there were 8 pages of these applications all of which are essentially the same. Whilst it is understandable that Microsoft may be doing this as it is clearly one of the smaller marketplaces among the competitors right now, the fact that the company is crowding the marketplace with these kinds of applications is disappointing, considering how hard some developers are finding it to get their applications approved.

Hopefully the trend we're seeing here will decline as the platform becomes more popular over time, or it may risk becoming bloated in a similar fashion to Android. It's great news that the platform has reached such a milestone so quickly, but Microsoft needs to clamp down on this as soon as possible.